An entertaining overview of 100 years of American piano music

Evan Mitchell, American Century

Born in New Jersey, educated in Indiana and Texas, and currently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Florida, pianist Evan Mitchell obviously has this music in his bones. He's put together a wonderful programme that represents the many strands American composers have woven into their piano music, from Gershwin in the 1920s, to 21st Century pieces by John Adams, Missy Mazzoli and Frederic Rzewski.

Most appealing to me in this fabulous musical montage is the contribution of Florence Price, who I believe is the most exciting musical (re)discovery in classical music in this century. Her three Snapshots, written in 1947-52 but not discovered until 2008, are character pieces that bring to mind three particular moments, captured as notes on manuscript paper as if on film. Price can be seen as a modernist artist working in the same vein as her close contemporary, Imogen Cunningham. Both stop time and achieve transcendence.

Imogen Cunningham, Three Dancers, Mills College, 1930

Another wonderful piece is Missy Mazzoli's Bolts of Loving Thunder, written in 2013. It's Mazzoli's homage to Johannes Brahms, containing references both to his late, great, autumnal works for piano, but also to the vital music of what she calls the "Pre-Beard Brahms", the handsome young man on the left. It's a fascinating 8½ minutes of synthesis of youthful vigour and mature wisdom.

Brahms in 1855 - Brahms+beard, by Maria Fellinger, c. 1893-96

It wouldn't be the American Century without Aaron Copland, of course. But his Piano Variations, from 1930 is a bleak and angular work of uncompromising modernism. Nothing could be farther from his later folkloric Americana-inspired popular works. At first this sounds more like Paris than New England; more like Stravinsky than a Shaker hymn. But it's still American in its own way, and good on Evan Mitchell for placing it in the centre of his album. Adolphus Hailstork's Eight Variations on “Shalom Chaverim” provides a more down-to-earth vibe. It's a cleverly-constructed work based on a really lovely tune. 

John Adams' American Berserk, from 2001, is a fascinating work. Adams called it "extroverted, punchy, and fundamentally good-natured." Mitchell lets the music swing, which is what is required. Let's call this Post-Bop Minimalism.  After another uncompromising piece, Frederic Rzewski's Piano Piece No. 4, from 1977, Mitchell wraps things up with Stephen Hough's brilliant, showy arrangement of the Carousel Waltz, from Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1945 Broadway show.

What a fascinating, varied and thought- and emotion-provoking hour+ of music we have on this Centaur disc. Evan Mitchell teaches us about the breadth of American music for the piano while keeping us entertained, and all without resorting to cliché.

This Canadian review comes with best wishes to Americans of Good Will, without threats or sanctions.

Remarkable music from Iceland

Atmospheriques: music by Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Bjarnason, Sigfusdottir, Gisladottir

I listened to these two discs one after another: the first is a normal CD, which I listened to to familiarize myself with this music. This is all definitely in my wheelhouse: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s CATAMORPHOSIS, from 2020; Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), from 2014; Daníel Bjarnason’s From Space I Saw Earth, from 2019; Maria Sigfúsdóttir’s Clockworking for Orchestra, from 2020; and Bára Gísladóttir’s ÓS, written for the Iceland Centenary in 2018. It's beautifully played by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, directed by Daniel Bjarnason.

Only a few months ago I reviewed Missy Mazzoli's latest album, Dark With Excessive Bright, which also includes her Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), with Tim Weiss conducting the Arctic Philharmonic. It seems like high-latitude orchestras are best situated to play this piece about the Music of the Spheres, situated as they are far from the noise of the world's cities, and closer to the light show of the Aurora Borealis. I prefer the performance of the Iceland players by the narrowest of margins in this important work, helped as it is by the sound engineering of Sono Luminus.

And it's the audio that brings us to the second disc: a Pure Audio Blu-ray disc with the identical repertoire, totalling just under an hour, in remarkable Surround Sound. As I've mentioned a few times in my reviews, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the audiophile component of recording, but listening to this Blu-ray knocked me for a loop. This will surely become a demonstration disc for high-end Surround Sound systems.

Iceland is a small country, but its music, both classical and popular, has the huge scope and universal appeal of the Sagas. This is a distinguished addition to a long and distinguished artistic tradition.

The cover painting is "Water and Mist I", by Kristin Morthens, from 2022.
 

Music of light and dark

Missy Mazzoli: Dark With Excessive Bright & other works

Though John Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, his description of God in Book 3 makes use of visual - indeed painterly - images:

Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Thron'd inaccessible, but when thou shad'st
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant Shrine,
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer

It's that chiaroscuro effect of Milton's that Missy Mazzoli took as her theme in 2018 when she wrote Dark With Excessive Bright, a concerto for contrabass and string orchestra.

"'Dark with excessive bright', a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a surreal and evocative description of God’s robes, written by a blind man. I love the impossibility of this phrase and how perfectly it describes the ghostly, heart-rending sound of strings."

When Mazzoli adapted her original version for violinist Peter Herresthal, she replaced the contrabass with a violin, "... essentially flipping the original work upside-down." It's instructive to compare the two versions; in a way, this new version for violin is almost like a negative image of a photograph. The clever synaesthetic effects, mixing light and dark with high and low sounds and contrasting musical textures, still remain, with this new variation only deepening the total effect of this music. Here is Mazzoli's version for contrabass, as recorded by Maxime Bibeau and the Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti:

There's an additional chapter to this, though. Mazzoli also wrote a version of her original work for contrabass and string quintet, and likewise, then, for this new version for violin and string quintet. This underlies the contrasts between the concertante and ripieno parts, and makes all the string textures more transparent. Both orchestra and quintet versions are included here, and it's fascinating to compare the two. Herresthal is a wonderful violinist, and a fine musician; the shift from virtuoso concerto to more of a chamber music sound is subtle, but finely judged. Likewise with the orchestral players: Jim Gaffigan conducts the Bergen Philharmonic's string forces in the full version, and Tim Weiss conducts players from the Arctic Philharmonic in the chamber work. It's all beautifully played. The BIS engineers provide suitable open and natural acoustic spaces for each version, highlighting all of Missy Mazzoli's subtle effects of texture and sound. This is fascinating music!

Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) has as one of its themes the Pythagorean concept of the "music of the spheres". This concept, popular in the Renaissance, appears often in Paradise Lost, where Milton, whose father was a composer, can indulge in something closer to his own experience than the visual imagery that relied upon his imagination and memory. But Mazzoli adds another spin here (pun intended), for Sinfonia also refers to the old Italian name for the hurdy gurdy; the "orbiting sphere" becomes more homespun: the hand-cranked rosin wheel of the instrument juxtaposed with the planetary orbits of the neo-Platonists.

These Worlds in Us, from 2006, takes its title from James Tate's poem "The Lost Pilot", about his father's death in World War II, and is dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's own father, who served in the Vietnam War. This is no Spitfire Prelude & Fugue by William Walton; this music is more contemplative than stirring, more about fatherhood than patriotism.

The two-part suite for orchestra Orpheus Undone has a serious program; it's about the moment when Orpheus loses Eurydice. "I have used the Orpheus myth as a way to explore the ways traumatic events disrupt the linearity and unity of our experience of time." This serious concept might have swamped a 16-minute piece for orchestra, but Mazzoli balances a heavy weight with finely drawn themes and slender orchestral effects. In the past few years I've had first-hand experience of how time is bent and tortured during the grieving process, and I found this music both understandable and somehow consoling.

Vespers for Violin, from 2014, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition in 2019. It's played here with panache by Peter Herresthal. This is such an evocative piece; in only six minutes it builds an impressive architecture of yearning and hopefulness. This is one of the finest albums of new classical music I've heard in a long time!

I must mention the wonderful essay by novelist and poet Garth Greenwell included in the liner notes. "This is music of intense drama, pungently gestural," he says, "but Mazzoli’s gestures are never orphaned, leading nowhere, as in so much contemporary music (and contemporary writing, too) that aims for drama." Greenwell praises Mazzoli for "using every resource at her command to think her life and her world at the highest intensity." There's so much here: from a blind poet's imagining of light and shade on a canvas to the entire range of sound available to the 21st century composer, and Missy Mazzoli brings it all to life with such grace and imagination.

The great cover photo is by Mats Bäcker.

This album will be released on March 3, 2023.